After George Russell and Lewis Hamilton finished qualifying in sixth and seventh place, Wolff said that Mercedes would be changing the design of their car. Andrew Shovlin, who is an engineering director for the company, explained that Mercedes already knew that there were some issues with the W14 car even before they started testing it on a track. It usually takes a long time to make changes to a car’s design.
Earlier this month, there were rumors that Mercedes was getting ready to introduce its first improvement package for the W14 in time for either the Baku race or for Miami. However, Wolff said that this won’t be happening and anything lasting to change the W14 won’t arrive until at least Imola, which is taking place from May 19th-21st. He explained further by saying that although they are making good improvements, it still needs to be tested and produced before it can be used.
We don’t want to make any changes before the Imola race. We are expecting that the upgrades we made will help us, but no one should expect a major improvement from them.
Wolff said it’s more likely that these changes will let us compete better with Ferrari and Aston Martin instead of taking pole position by half a second. That would be really great for us.
The photo you see above is of George Russell, a Mercedes F1 W14 driver. The team (Mercedes) doesn’t plan on making the car go any faster for its next three races. Also, both Russell and Hamilton weren’t in agreement with what they should adjust in the car on Fridays in both Saudi Arabia and Australia. In the long run though, the team knows what it needs to do, but it’ll take some time until they reach their goal.
He continued saying: “After the Bahrain race, everything suddenly became clearer to us. We had been trying to make something happen, but were having trouble figuring it out. However, now, we know what we need do and how to get there, though it won’t be easy – it will take some time.”
The FIA has recently made a rule that prohibits mechanics from touching the F1 cars when they receive pitstop penalties. This was done after Alonso’s review.
George Russell thinks that the upcoming car changes may be able to raise their speed faster compared to when they switched between the W13 and W14 models at the beginning of the season. He said, “It might take time for those changes to show in our lap times, but hopefully eventually, we’ll see some big improvements.”
“We’re getting more success today than we had throughout all of the winter. That means that we did something right, and it’s working out even better now.”
